How Sentry's PostgreSQL primary stopped accepting writes in 2015 due to XID wraparound — a knowable failure that many production systems are still vulnerable to.

Distributed systems can't use database transactions to span multiple services. The SAGA pattern is how you get consistency anyway — but it comes with constraints most teams underestimate.

How the outbox pattern eliminates phantom transactions between your database and event stream — and why at-least-once delivery with idempotent consumers is the right tradeoff.

A routine software update that should have taken minutes accidentally deleted Slack's entire cache, triggering a chain reaction that brought down one of the world's most-used workplace tools.

The SAGA pattern solves distributed consistency — but wiring it with Kafka requires a lot of plumbing you have to get right yourself. Temporal handles reliable execution, retries, and compensation in the workflow runtime, so you can focus on the business logic.